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1/29/14

We Are Half Way Through The Camp

Time does fly fast. We are already done with our second week of the camp. Due to medical reason, I was absent from the camp for couple days. When I came back, I saw a welcome back message left by my students for me. My co-teacher did a good job with the camp during my absence. I was very grateful to have a motivated co-teacher. He told me that he made the right decision to participate in the camp despite the long trip that he has to make every day. He enjoyed seeing the improvement that the students made, and the camp is a good opportunity for him to practice his English.

It has been two weeks since we started our Spanish Hat rule. It has proven to work very well to prevent students from speaking in Spanish. My students have been really into it since Day 1. They would catch other students and of course their teachers who didn't use Spanish Hat when they spoke in Spanish. Also, using the ticket out to allow students to leave proved to be a good strategy to reinforce what the students had learned on that day.

Below are photos of what we did to learn about body parts.

Students in group of 4 created their monster by using the body parts vocabulary that they learned. Then they had to present their monster to the whole class, "our monster has one eye, ten legs, four hands etc."

Students were divided in 5 different teams. Each team chose a model, and they had to work within their team to paste the right labels to the body parts.

A blindfold student was guided by the whole class to paste parts of the face to the right place.

On Friday, we had our review session of all of the topics
that the students learned during that whole week. We played category game where
students, in groups of 4, had to put vocabularies under the right category. The
first group that finished putting them correctly was the winner. Later, we
played Jeopardy where students were divided into 2 groups. There are 3
different categories. Each category began with a question that worth from 100
to 600 points. The higher the point, the difficult the question is. For
example, at 600 point with personality category, the students have to create 3
sentences using 3 different possessive adjectives, 3 different family members,
and 3 difference personality. They would get 600 points if they could write the
3 sentences correctly with the required components within 1 minute. Students seemed to do well although they still
struggled with the grammar part. We ended our second half of the session by
learning how to make friendship bracelets.

Blog on a Mission

The JumpStart Costa Rica blog allows local camp coordinators and teachers to share news from their sites during camp preparation, implementation and follow-up. For more information on the nationwide program, to donate or volunteer, visit our official program website.